Most wars

In most wars, you see, killing is only the means to a political end, but in the Sutlej campaign it was an end in itself.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.342, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.




Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, war.

In which Lt. Flashman reviews the tactics of Sir Hugh Gough

I caught my breath in horror, for it was Ferozeshah all over again, with that raving old spud-walloper risking everything on the sabre and the bayonet, hand to hand — but then the Sikhs were groggy from Moodkee, in positions hastily dug and manned, while now the were entrenched in a miniature Torres Vedras, with ditch-and-dyke works twenty feet high, enfiladed by murderous camel-swivels and packed with tulwar-swinging lunatics fairly itching to die for the Guru. You can’t do it, Paddy, thinks I, it won’t answer this time, you’ll break your great thick Irish head against this fortress of shot and steel, and have your army torn to ribbons, and lose the war, and never see Tipperary again, you benighted old bog-trotter, you —


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.331, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, tactics.

An old Irishman

…a continuous roar of explosions, shaking the ground underfoot, reverberating through the mists of the morning. Beyond our view, on the southern shore, an old Irishman in a white coat was beating his shillelagh on the Khalsa’s door, and with a sinking heart I realized I had come a bare hour too late. The battle of Sobraon had begun.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.325, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, shillelagh.

The famous "fighting coat"

      All India knew that white coat of Gough’s, the famous “fighting coat” that the crazy old son-of-a-bitch had been flaunting at his foes for fifty years, from South Africa and the Peninsula to the Northwest Frontier. Now he was using it to draw fire from his army to himself (and the two unlucky gallopers whom the selfish old swine had dragged along). It was the maddest-brain trick you ever saw — and, damnation, it worked! I can see him still, holding the tails out and showing his teeth, his white hair streaming in the wind, and the earth exploding round him, for the Sikh gunners took the bait and hammered us with everything they had.






Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.264, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, coat.

A ragged fence of bayonets

…and the muskets of the infantry squares came to the present in a ragged fence of bayonets that must be ridden under as that magnificent sea of men and horses engulfed us. I never saw the like in my life, I who watched the great charge against Campbell’s Highlanders at Balaclava — but those were just Russians, while these were the fathers of the Guides and Probyn’s and the Bengal Lancers, and the only thing to stop them at full tilt was a horse soldier as good as themselves.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.260, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, cavalry.

The forgotten brigadier

      Historians say that on that one moment, as the Khalsa’s spearhead was rushing at our throat, rested the three centuries of British India. Perhaps. It was surely the moment in which Gough’s battered little army stared certain death and destruction in the face, and whatever may have settled our fate later, one man turned the hinge then and there. Without him, we (aye, and perhaps all of India) would have been swept away in bloody ruin. I’ll wager you’ve never heard of him, the forgotten brigadier, Mickey White.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.260, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, hinge.

Blind luck

      You’ll have difficulty finding Ferozeshah (or Pheeroo Shah, as we Punjabi purists call it) in the atlas nowadays. It’s a scrubby little hamlet about halfway between Ferozepore and Moodkee, but in its way it’s a greater place than Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay, for it’s where the fate of India was settled — appropriately by treachery, folly, and idiot courage beyond belief. And most of all, by blind luck.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.245, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, luck.

Aldershot in turbans

As far as you could see, among the endless lines of tents and waving standards, the broad maidan* was alive with foot battalions at drill, horse regiments at field exercise, and guns at practice — they were all uniformed and in perfect order, that was the shocking thing. Black, brown, and yellow armies in those days, you see, might be as brave as any, but they didn’t have centuries of drill and tactical movement drummed into ’em, not even Zulus, or Ranavalona’s Hova guardsmen. That was the thing about the Khalsa: it was Aldershot in turbans. It was an army.

*Plain


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.58, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Khalsa.